Dive Brief:
- Google announced the launch of Smart display campaigns for all advertisers on the Google Display Network (GDN) in a blog post.
- Smart campaigns use machine learning to automate the process for marketers including finding prospective customers by using insights from millions of apps and websites; creating image, native and text ads that fit across GDN; and setting bids to meet marketers’ performance goals.
- According to the post, marketers using Smart display campaigns are seeing an average 20% lift in conversions at the same cost per acquisition compared to other display campaigns.
Dive Insight:
Hotel search platform trivago is one brand using Smart display campaigns. For its part it provided Google with creative assets like headlines, descriptions of hotel listings and images as well as business goals with a target CPA and daily budget. From there AdWords created more than 25,000 tailored ads that resulted in 36% more conversions at the same CPA. Credit Karma and Hulu Japan also tapped Smart display campaigns and ended up with a 37% lift in conversions.
The news comes as more marketers are leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to take on some of the more mundane tasks in digital media, like data crunching, while simultaneously enabling brands to scale up the volume of data — and by extension the number of insights — they can process. Increasingly, these technologies are also being used to support campaign creation, like with Smart campaigns.
In separate AdWords news, late last month Google rolled out improvements to the store visits measurement metric. The improvements to the two-year-old metric included upgrading deep learning models to improve how store visits are measured by better prioritizing locations signals most predictive of actual visits; increasing the precision of the geography and geometry of business locations via Google Earth, Street View and scanning Wi-Fi strength; and adding additional verification by surveying users about store visits.